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Search finds the passages in your legal corpus that match your query and lists them directly, without running an AI agent. Use it when you know roughly what you’re looking for and want to jump straight to the relevant provisions. When you’d rather ask a question and have Mesa reason over the corpus for you, switch to Ask AI instead.

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Search vs. Ask AI

The Home composer has two modes. Toggle between them above the chat box.
Pick Search, type your query, and press Enter to open the results on the Search page.

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Require an exact phrase

By default, Search matches the words in your query flexibly. To require an exact, contiguous phrase, wrap it in quotation marks. Mesa treats the quoted text as a hard constraint: only passages that contain the phrase exactly are returned.
  • You can combine a quoted phrase with other, unquoted terms in the same query.
  • The active phrase constraints appear as Must include chips above your results, so you can see exactly why the list is narrow.
If a quoted search returns too few results, click Search without quotes to re-run the same query with the phrase constraint relaxed.

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Jump straight to a section

When you’ve pinned a collection, Search suggests matching section titles as you type. After two characters, a short list of sections whose titles match your text appears beneath the box, each with a breadcrumb showing where it sits in the code. Use the arrow keys and Enter, or click a suggestion, to open that provision directly; handy when you know the section you want by name and would rather jump to it than scan a results list. Press Enter without picking a suggestion to run a normal search instead.

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Narrow the scope

Use Pin a collection next to the search box to limit results to a single jurisdiction, regulation, or collection instead of your entire corpus. Clear it to search everything again. You can also search from inside a piece of content: while reading in the Library, choose Search only this section to keep results within the page you’re on.

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Open a result

Each result links to the provision in the Library, where you can read it in full, annotate it, or pin it. Your query stays on the Search page, so you can move between matches without re-running the search.

Library

Browse and read the legal content that Search draws from.

Exhaustive search

Catalogue every matching item in a corpus, not just the best matches.

Models

Switch to Ask AI to have an agent reason over the corpus for you.
Last modified on July 17, 2026